Nelya Mikhailova’s real name was Nina Kulagina (30 July 1926 – April 1990) she was a Russian woman who demonstrated psychic powers, particularly in psychokinesis. Academic research of her phenomenon was conducted in the USSR for the last 20 years of her life.

During the Cold War, silent black-and-white films of her moving objects on a table in front of her without touching them.

These films were allegedly made under controlled conditions for Soviet authorities and caused excitement for many psychic researchers around the world, some of whom believed that they represented clear evidence for the existence of psychic phenomena. According to reports from the Soviet Union, 40 scientists, two of whom were Nobel laureates.

To ensure that external electromagnetic impulses did not interfere, she was placed inside of a metal cage while she supposedly demonstrated an ability to remove a marked matchstick from a pile of matchsticks under a glass dome.

Skeptic Soviet scientists checked her thoroughly before and after analyzing her demonstrations. Their tests ruled out wires, wind, building vibrations, or hypnotism as causes.

Electroencephalograph (brainwave) machines disclose that Mikhailova emits fifty times a normal person’s brain waves and is surrounded by an electromagnetic field one-tenth as powerful as that surrounding the entire Earth.

Nina could mentally see things inside people’s pockets. When she met sick people she could identify the disease they were suffering from. On one occasion when Kulagina was in a particularly angry mood, she was walking towards a cupboard in her apartment when a jug in the cupboard suddenly moved to the edge of the shelf, fell and smashed to pieces on the floor. After that, changes began to take place in her apartment. Lights went on and off; objects became animated and seemed somehow to be attracted to her. It was in effect a type of poltergeist activity, except that Kulagina was convinced the psychic power was coming from her and discovered that, if she tried, she could control it.

In 1964, while in hospital recovering from a nervous breakdown, Nina spent a lot of time sewing. According to published accounts doctors were amazed when they saw that she was able to reach into her sewing basket and choose any colour of thread she needed without looking at it. Local parapsychologists were contacted and the following year, when she had fully recovered, she agreed to take part in various experiments. Kulagina was tested and it was found that she could apparently ‘see’ colours with her fingertips, bringing to mind Rosa Kuleshova, a school teacher from the Ural Mountains, who also claimed to possess this talent.

Rosa Kuleshova demonstrated the ability to “read” printed words with the fingers of her right hand when her normal vision was completely obstructed, an ability usually termed dermo-optical perception or eyeless sight. She could also determine color tones on paper and objects by touch. Experiments with Kuleshova were reported in 1963 by Soviet scientist I. M. Gol’dberg. In 1964 Life reporter Bob Brigham saw Kuleshova in Moscow and stated that she was able to read the small print on his business card accurately with her elbow when her normal vision was entirely obstructed. Soon other Soviet subjects were discovered to have the ability of eyeless sight, and new programs of scientific investigation were undertaken. The faculty of “skin vision” was renamed “bio-introscopy” in the Soviet Union.

Rosa Kuleshova died in 1978 from a brain tumor. Reports of her successful demonstrations of eyeless sight in the editorial offices of the Moscow journal Technika Mologeji shortly before her death were reported in The International Journal of Paraphysics (vol. 13, nos. 3, 4).

In March 1988 Kulagina won a libel action against the magazine Man and Law, published by the Soviet Justice Ministry. Two articles by Vyacheslav Strelkov published in the magazine described her as “a swindler and a crook.” The Moscow court ruled that Strelkov had no firm evidence on which to base his allegations, and the magazine was ordered to publish an apology. In a subsequent appeal to the Moscow city court, the district court’s ruling was upheld: “the articles published by Man and Law besmirch the honor and dignity of Nina Kulagina and…it must publish an apology.”

Dermo-optical perception (DOP)—also known as dermal vision, dermo-optics, eyeless sight, eyeless vision, skin vision, skin reading, finger vision, paroptic vision, para-optic perception, cutaneous perception, digital sight, and bio-introscopy[1]—are terms that are used in parapsychological literature to denote the alleged capability to perceive colors, differences in brightness, and/or formed images through the skin (without using the eyes, as distinct from blindsight), especially upon touching with the fingertips.

Soviet Psychiatrist Isaac Goldberg could well understand his colleagues’ doubts, but he insisted that he really did have an epileptic patient who could read ordinary print with her fingertips. To prove it, he had Rosa Kuleshova, 22, admitted to the Sverdlov Clinic for Nervous Disorders. There before a skeptical audience, Dr. Goldberg blindfolded Rosa and had the blindfold checked. Then Rosa opened a book at random, passed the fingertips of her right hand lightly over the page, and fluently read the text aloud. She did the same with a newspaper.

Rosa feels the colour of the light, penetrating through light filters and falling onto her fingers. Rosa says: ” This ray is red, that ray is green; that one is orange, and the other one is blue”. Moreover, she is able to identify not only a bright ray of light, but a weak one as well. She can even better identify coloured rays, let through the lens filled with water and then reflected on her hand with a mirror.

It was noticed, that sometimes while reading, her fingers are below the line, but Rosa is still able to read what is written there. To understand this phenomenon, an experiment was set up. Grey-colored triangles, placed against a bright-colored background: first red, then green, and then the yellow one were shown to Rosa. Those grey triangles, due to the contrast effect, visually acquire, especially on the edges, the shade complementary to the color of the background – against the red background gray triangles turn green, against the green background they seem pinkish, on the yellow – blue. Rosa’s finger was put in the middle of the grey triangle so that it would not touch the surrounding coloured background. Every time she identified the surface not as grey but as a coloured one, the color being complementary to the background: green, pink, blue. It means that her fingers perceived the light, reflected from the neighbouring coloured parts. The ability of sensing colour differences allowed Rosa to read with her hand texts and numbers through glass and cellophane, define shape and colour of the curve on the oscillograph screen, and level, and sometimes even colour of liquids in a test-tube.

In 1960 fourteen year old Margaret Foos of Ellerson, Virginia, underwent elaborate tests conducted by experts. Securely blindfolded, Margaret read randomly selected passages of print, identified colours and objects and even played a game of checkers.

In the August 1963 edition of their Parapsychology Bulletin, the Parapsychology Laboratory of Duke University printed an article titled, The “Paroptic” Illusion. It began, “It comes in waves, recurring every 15 or 20 years, this curious, contagious notion that certain blindfolded persons are able to “see” with some sensory area besides their eyes …” Some people claimed that while blindfolded they could identify cards, read passages from the Bible, or play checkers.

Every case that they were permitted to examine and test, the article went on, were exposed as hoaxes. They were also of the opinion that were they able to test them all they’d find that every one of them was a trick. Among those named were “Professor” Shepard of Toledo, (their quote marks, not mine) Pat Marquis, (my post about Pat Marquis) and Rosa Kulenshova.

A few years earlier, in 1957, Col. Frank F. Carr of the U.S. Army Intelligence Board had written J. B. Rhine, the head of the Lab, about a case that was in all the papers at the time: William Foos and his paroptic daughter, Margaret Foos.

Army Writes J. B. Rhine

Foos was making the additional extraordinary claim that by developing their powers of extra-sensory perception he could “teach the blind to see,” to the point where they could safely drive a car. J. B. Rhine responded (and I can’t help noticing the efficiency of the U.S. Post Office in 1957, not a complaint about the Post Office, those were different times).

J. B. Rhine Responds to the Army

The Lab had actually conducted ESP tests with sight impaired children. From his book Frontier Science of the Mind:

“Groups of blind children have yielded results that compared with those of seeing children of the same age … while no group of any size has been found completely devoid of capacity to demonstrate ESP, at the same time no subdivision of the human species has been found to stand out in any really distinctive way as either possessing superior psi powers or superior control over them.”

The FBI was also investigating Foos’s claims and they seemed to be quite excited initially. “Should his claims be well-founded, there is no limit to the value which would accrue to the FBI – complete and undetectable access to mail, the diplomatic pouch; visual access to buildings – the possibilities are unlimited insofar as law enforcement and counterintelligence are concerned.” However, by the end of their investigation they lost all confidence that Foos would ever be able to deliver on his claims.

If she is still alive Margaret Foos would be 72 or 73 now (her age was reported differently). She was just a kid at the time, and she was probably simply doing as her father asked. I don’t believe she has anything to answer for. It would just be interesting to hear her side of the story now, all these years later.

From the Parapsychology Bulletin:

Farigoule “did not use hypnosis but induced a ‘delta condition’ in his subjects that may have been like it. He taught his people to see with the cheek line under the eyes. In fact, this suited his method of blindfolding better. The subjects saw objects placed low in front of them. Again, appearances favored the sincerity of all. Mr. Romains was, in fact, so confident that he haughtily declined to discuss the demonstration at the Duke Laboratory of the inadequacy of his blindfold.”

Rhine suggested simple controls, like the one described in his letter to Carr above, but these were all rejected by Foos and others. In any case, this seems to have been the last wave. I’m not aware of anyone making claims like this since then, although maybe someone will come along and post about someone who has.

There are also instances where Kulagina apparently displayed extraordinary healing powers. She could, it was said, make wounds heal up simply by holding her hand above them. She was also tested by Russian scientists for psychokinesis and the results were apparently so remarkable that, in order to keep her real identity secret, she was obliged for many years to use the pseudonym of Nelya Mikhailova. What these remarkable results were, however, has never been exactly stated.

It is said that the tests and experiments put a strain on her health which caused Nina Kulagina to suffer a near fatal heart attack in the late 1970s which forced her to limit her mediumship.

Nelya Mikhailova’s moved of objects by mind power, stopped a frog’s heart, caused burns on skin, seperated yolk from the white of an egg and was able to interfere with medical and scientific equipment. While Sergeyev Detectors detected energy fields around Nelya’s body and they began to pulse in rythm with her heart beat and brainwaves, it has not been possible to monitor the energy fields around the objects when she directed her energy fields towards the objects nor upto the objects when the energy fields passed from her body to the objects.

Scientists and psychologists who tested Nina Kulagina pointed out that they physically examined the psychic to make sure there were no hidden magnets or threads. Moreover, there is said to be no direct evidence of her faking her abilities (Henry Gris and William Dick, The New Soviet Psychic Discovery, 1979)

Nina Kulagina died in 1990. It is believed that the over-exhaustion of her psychic abilities led to her death (Henry Gris and William Dick, 1979). The experiments had taken a toll on her and probably hastened her death. During one of her tests with Dr. Redjak, she was totally exhausted and she apparently lost almost four pounds in half an hour. (The psychic was said to be converting matter of her own body into energy.)

Yakov Fishelev of the Sverdlovsk Pedagogical Institute also with subjects at the Pyshma school for the blind experimented with eyeless sight starting with fingertip color recognition and then developing the ability to distinguish shapes of letters. S. N. Dobronravov of Sverdlovsk reported that he had found “skin sight” potential in 72 percent of children, mostly between the ages of 7 and 12.

At the Filatov Institute Laboratory of the Physiology of Vision, in Odessa, an experiment was conducted by Dr. Andrei Shevalev. His subject was Vania Dubrovich, an eight-year-old boy blind from early childhood, whose eyes and optical nerves had been removed. Shevalev attached a lens to Vania’s forehead, and the boy learned to distinguish degrees of light through the lens. This experiment claimed to open up new possibilities of “skin glasses.”

In the freer atmosphere arising from the Mikhail Gorbachev policy of glasnost, public support and discussion of psychic matters increased. Psychic healing received much attention, and the healer Barbara Ivanova treated many prominent officials. She has also undertaken distant healing through the telephone.

Tania Bykovskaia Bykovskaia was tested by a commission from Kuban Medical Institute in Krasnodar, which reported on her ability to distinguish the colors of two balls hidden from sight.

In 1965 at the Scientific Conference of the Ural Division of the Society of Psychologists in Perm, Dr. S. N. Dobronravov of Sverdlovsk stated that some 72 percent of children had skin sight potential, especially between the ages of seven and twelve years. Dr. Abram Novomeisky of the psychology laboratory at the Nizhne-Tagil Institute experimented with Vasily B., a metallurgist who had been totally blind for seven years, and found that Vasily could distinguish colors by touch and at a distance. As with other subjects, the ability diminished in the diminution or absence of light. Experiments suggested that bright electric light enhanced the faculty of eyeless sight. Another frequently reported observation was that different colors had specific sensations that aided identification. For example, red seemed to burn, orange to warm, yellow less so, green was neutral, light blue cooling, navy blue freezing. Other subjects reported that red had a sticky sensation and blue felt smooth.

Dr Iosif Goldberg found that those who had damaged their eye or optic nerve could develop “eyeless sight” while those with damage to the optic center of the brain could not.

As we learn more about the body’s capabilities in conjunction with the mind, a

new physiology is unfolding in the world. The hocus pocus about ESP (extra-

sensory perception) is evolving out of the realm of mysticism and occultism and into

the world of science. In other words, as our instrumentation improves, we’re

beginning to measure and explain things that formerly were mysteries.

It also has been found that if your finger temperature is down to around 70° –

75°F, your perception is off a bit. If your finger temperature is over 90°F and the